Some Things Do End

Sunday, December 18, 2011 – Some Things Do End

If you want a happy ending that depends, of course, on where you stop your story. ~ Orson Welles

Heroes know that things must happen when it is time for them to happen. A quest may not simply be abandoned; unicorns may go unrescued for a long time, but not forever; a happy ending cannot come in the middle of the story. ~ Peter S. Beagle

In the end, everything is a gag. ~ Charlie Chaplin

Fortunate people often have very favorable beginnings and very tragic endings. What matters isn’t being applauded when you arrive – for that is common – but being missed when you leave. ~ Baltasar Gracian

Life is not so much about beginnings and endings as it is about going on and on and on. It is about muddling through the middle. ~ Anna Quindlen

These happy endings all express the weak and sly promise that the world is not rotten and out of joint but meaningful and ultimately in excellent condition. ~ Douglas Sirk

The beginnings and endings of all human undertakings are untidy. ~ John Galsworthy

If the world comes to an end, I want to be in Cincinnati. Everything comes there ten years later. ~ Mark Twain

Man was made at the end of the week’s work when God was tired. ~ Mark Twain

The end of a melody is not its goal: but nonetheless, had the melody not reached its end it would not have reached its goal either. A parable. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

The opposite of the happy ending is not actually the sad ending–the sad ending is sometimes the happy ending. The opposite of the happy ending is actually the unsatisfying ending. ~ Orson Scott Card

Nothing ends nicely, that’s why it ends. ~ Tom Cruise

What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from. ~ T. S. Eliot

The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead. ~ Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, 1952

The secret to a rich life is to have more beginnings than endings. ~ Dave Weinbaum

Great is the art of beginning, but greater is the art of ending. ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it. ~ George Orwell

One day President Roosevelt told me that he was asking publicly for suggestions about what the war should be called. I said at once “The Unnecessary War.” ~ Winston Churchill

The only winner in the War of 1812 was Tchaikovsky. ~ Solomon Short

Say what you have to say and the first time you come to a sentence with a grammatical ending – sit down. ~ Winston Churchill

Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is far the best ending for one. ~ Oscar Wilde

It isn’t necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice. There are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia. ~ Frank Zappa

What then is tragedy? In the Elizabethan period it was assumed that a play ending in death was a tragedy, but in recent years we have come to understand that to live on is sometimes far more tragic than death. ~ George P. Baker

The, the key here, I think, is to, to not think of death as an end, but, but think of it more as a very effective way of, of cutting down on your expenses. Regarding love, huh, you know, uh, what can you say? It’s, it’s not the, the quantity of your sexual relations that count, it’s the quality. On the other hand, if the quantity drops below once every eight months, I would definitely look into it. Well, that’s about it for me, folks. Good-bye. ~ Woody Allen, the closing lines of Love and Death (1975)

In the end we will conserve only what we love. We will love only what we understand. We will understand only what we are taught. ~ Baba Dioum

If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading. ~ Lao Tzu

If your knees aren’t green by the end of the day, you ought to seriously re-examine your life. ~ Bill Watterson

I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be. ~ Douglas Adams

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